Mac Pro - Should I work off of External Drive?

[elgrayso]

I am going to get a mac pro (refurbished) within the next month or so.
However I realize how small their hard drives are (256GB or so, starting model) and am weighing my options on what to do to expand that space.

Currently, I have an iMac/1TB drive that is taken up by 900GB of files; these are Applications, iTunes Library, Projects from over the years, etc.
I have an external seagate drive that is 5GB which I store most of my media files on.

I am curious on what people with these computers do to keep their computers running fast, but still have room to work.

 

[Natzoo]

I would upgrade the memory of my mac, or just keep adding external harddrives

 

[elgrayso]

i consolidated the question and asked it in a better manner in a new thread.
i couldnt figure out how to delete this one :-(

sorry about that

 

[IHelpId10t5]

With the recent move to faster, yet smaller, SSDs as boot drives, it's become necessity to carefully consider where you store things. For speed, I would suggest booting and keeping your applications on the boot drive. Then, move everything else to a Thunderbolt external.

I recently purchased a WD Thunderbolt Duo external for my "bulk" storage and have been very pleased with it. I personally set it up to RAID1 configuration for some redundancy and it's still faster that my iMac's internal non-SSD HDD.

Just take the time to do your research on the storage that may work best for you. And, don't forget to consider how you will back everything up. Directly connected (DAS) HDDs are MUCH easier to back up using TimeMachine and cloud backup clients.

Good luck.